The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [130]
She got out of her bed and climbed onto the footboard of theirs.
They turned off the light and got in but she didn’t move. She sat there, looking hard at them until their faces were well defined the dark. “I’m not as old as you all,” she said, “but I’m about million times smarter.”
“There are some things,” Susan said, “that a child of your age doesn’t know,” and they both began to giggle.
“Go back to your own bed,” Joanne said.
The child didn’t move. “One time,” she said, her voice hollow sounding in the dark, “I saw this rabbit have rabbits.”
There was a silence. Then Susan said, “How?” in an indifferent tone and she knew that she had them. She said she wouldn’t tell until they told about the you-know-what. Actually she had never seen a rabbit have rabbits but she forgot this as they began to tell what they had seen in the tent.
It had been a freak with a particular name but they couldn’t remember the name. The tent where it was had been divided into two parts by a black curtain, one side for men and one for women. The freak went from one side to the other, talking first to the men and then to the women, but everyone could hear. The stage ran all the way across the front. The girls heard the freak say to the men, “I’m going to show you this and if you laugh, God may strike you the same way.” The freak had a country voice, slow and nasal and neither high nor low, just flat. “God made me thisaway and if you laugh He may strike you the same way. This is the way He wanted me to be and I ain’t disputing HIS way. I’m showing you because I got to make the best of it. I expect you to act like ladies and gentlemen. I never done it to myself nor had a thing to do with it but I’m making the best of it. I don’t dispute hit.” Then there was a long silence on the other side of the tent and finally the freak left the men and came over onto the women’s side and said the same thing.
The child felt every muscle strained as if she were hearing the answer to a riddle that was more puzzling than the riddle itself. “You mean it had two heads?” she said.
“No,” Susan said, “it was a man and woman both. It pulled up its dress and showed us. It had on a blue dress.”
The child wanted to ask how it could be a man and woman both without two heads but she did not. She wanted to get back into her own bed and think it out and she began to climb down off the footboard.
“What about the rabbit?” Joanne asked.
The child stopped and only her be: appeared, over the footboard, abstracted, absent. “It spit them out of its mouth.” she said, “six of them.”
She lay in bed trying to picture the tent with the freak walking from side to side but she was too sleepy to figure it out. She was better able to see the faces of the country people watching, the men more solemn than they were in church, and the women stern and polite, with painted-looking eyes, standing as if they were waiting for the first note of the piano to begin the hymn. She could hear the freak saying, “God made me thisaway and I don’t dispute hit,” and the people saying, “Amen. Amen.”
“God done this to me and I praise Him.”
“Amen. Amen.”
“He could strike you this away.”
“Amen. Amen.”
“But he has not,”
“Amen.”
“Raise yourself up. A temple of tile Holy Ghost. You! You are God’s temple, don’t you know? Don’t you know? God’s Spirit has a dwelling in you, don’t you know?”
“Amen. Amen.”
“If anybody desecrates the temple Of God, God will bring him to ruin and if you laugh, He may strike you thisaway. A temple of God is a holy thing. Amen. Amen.”
“I am a temple of the Holy Ghost.’
“Amen.”
The people began to slap their hands without making a loud noise and with a regular beat between the Amens, more and more softly, as if they knew there was a child near, half asleep.
The next afternoon the girls put on their brown convent uniforms again and the child and her mot her took them back to Mount St. Scholastica. “Oh glory, oh Pete!” they said. “Back to the salt mines.” Alonzo Myers drove them and the child sat